Seeming Orthodox Vs. Being Orthodox

AKRON, Ohio — When a new Antiochian Orthodox church opened up and drew families from several evangelical churches, it created a minor buzz around town.

At the Evangelical Free church, it also created another service.

“I’ve been caught off guard by other shifts in church trends,” says EV Free pastor Brian Fitzgerald, 44. “Not this time.”

In a defensive maneuver, his church soon added an Orthodox-style service to cater to people who want more ritual and a feeling of connection to historical tradition.

“It’s the same sermon, same worship songs in many cases, just done in a more liturgical style,” Fitzgerald says. “I don’t mind changing the packaging for people. It freshens it up for them and for me.”

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One pastor explains that most people don’t want to switch traditions, but just want “a taste of ritual and liturgy to supplement their usual tradition. If a few candles and a change of presentation satisfy that, we’re all for it.”

Other evangelicals who have flirted with the Orthodox tradition found that they, too, prefer courtship to commitment. The Bartel family of suburban Cleveland, Ohio, tried the local Orthodox church for a month, but “couldn’t make the cultural shift long-term,” says the father. When they walked back into an evangelical service, “the drums and guitars sounded pretty good for once.”

::::Face palm::::

Guys. Guys. It’s not about theater. The liturgy and the icons are inextricable from the theology, and from the “cultural shift” the Bartel family found was beyond their capacity. The Orthodox life is not about enhancing your Sunday morning experience with a few candles and a change of presentation. It’s not about changing your Sunday morning lifestyle; it’s about radically changing your life. The Orthodox liturgical experience has been essentially unchanged for many, many centuries. You can’t expect to “get” it after only a month of services. You have to have faith that there is something present here that Christians across the vast geography of nation, culture, and time, found valuable and true about this worship, this approach to God. If you stick it out, it will be revealed to you. But you have to submit to Orthodoxy’s rhythms and practices. You have to be willing to make the cultural shift, in order to be remade. To think that Orthodoxy is only about adding smells, bells, candles and icons onto what you normally do is like thinking you can dress up like the Queen of England and become Her Majesty.

UPDATE: Ah, silly me — a couple of readers say the source for this story, Lark News, is an Evangelical satire site. Excellent! I got pwned. Maybe the reason it’s such good satire is that it sounds so real. Great job, gentlemen, great job.

Postmodern believers want to use all of their senses, stressed Hall. They want smells and bells. They want to see icons and statues, as well as drama and digital clips from movies. They look for God in nature, as well as scripture. They want to encounter God, not mere words about God.

But this doesn’t mean they want to change their beliefs. The faithful at Rivermont Avenue remain steadfastly Baptist, said music minister Wayne Bulson. While they use elements of ancient liturgy, they believe that the Irish Bannock bread is still bread and the grape juice is still grape juice. They are embracing symbols, not sacraments.

“People want a sense of the ancient, but they still want something that they feel is appropriate to their lives, today,” said Bulson. “I mean, we’re still Baptists. We’re not Catholic or Orthodox or anything else. … We’re not pushing for Baptist monasteries. What we’re trying to do is find out what will be meaningful to our people, what will help them experience God in their lives.

“We’re not proud. We’re willing to borrow things from all kinds of traditions, as long as they work for us.”

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60 Responses to Seeming Orthodox Vs. Being Orthodox

“We’re not proud. We’re willing to borrow things from all kinds of traditions, as long as they work for us.”

Had it occured to any of the cynics that all the denominations and liturgies under discussion are fractional portions of the Body of Christ?

Maybe people are attracted to different rituals, liturgies, styles, philosophies, theophanies, because they ALL reflect a small facet of a very transcendent godhead?

New ways tend to arise in struggle against old traditions, because it seems human beings require that to pay attention to anything new, but after a while, the new acquires some tradition of its own, looks around, recognizes that neighbors of different practice are actually good people, and even look into what they have to offer.

Roman Catholic mass can be a very inspiring worship service… its the Vatican I have a problem with. Might try Orthodox sometime, but I live in an area where if you’re not Greek you’re asked what you are doing here, or if you’re not Serbian… I think those are the main local variants… must be a Russian one somewhere, not to mention that nice new Coptic church off Drexel near I-94.

“I had a professor in seminary, a post-war liberal, but the most orthodox of Reformed theologians, who told us our first day of class that we, who represented a number of different traditions within Protestant Christianity, should be true to whatever tradition into which we were born, study it so as to make it true to ourselves and to others.”

Where did this professor think all those different traditions came from in the first place? By his reasoning, all the ur-protestants should have steeped themselves in catholicism and stayed put.

Some people seem to feel that humans were way smarter in the past, and that therefore the further back a tradition goes the more worth it has. Luckily, as one of those modern kids, I am too stupid to believe them.

So this is hoax. However one comment I’ll make anyway: when someone complains about the “culture” of an Orthodox church, do not assume they are talking about the Christian culture. They may be talking about the ethnic culture. We have too many Orthodox congregations which are “ethnic clubs with a chaplain”, and that can be a turn-off to outsiders. I’ll been Orthodox for seventeen years, and can still find that alienating. Just Sunday night I went to a pan-Orthodox Sunday of Orthodoxy vespers service at a Greek church; clergy and parishioners were present from multiple churches in the Baltimore area (Fr. Green and Khouriya Fredericka were there, among others). Nevertheless the church did most of the service in Greek, which struck me as a bit inappropriate, and might have left an non-Orthodox person unfamiliar with the service scratching their head. (The vespers service includes numerous verses which have a teaching function; they are not mere hymnological fluff– and as such they should always be done in a language the congregation understands)

@Paul Emmons – thank you for the recommended reading. I will add it to my reading list. As you accurately assessed, I am Episcopalian because, at least when functioning properly, I find it is a good middle ground between traditional evangelicalism and, well, tradition.

You also might be accurate that I am conflating Catholic teachings with Orthodox ones. To Viking LS’ point, I know that neither church teaches “worship” of Mary and I am quite comfortable with the idea of praying with the saints, though I don’t quite know how to do it. Neither assumption nor dormition would be problematic for me. In fact, I find the elevated status of Mary attractive in some aspects.

What does the Orthodox Church teach about the sinlessness of Mary and her ever-virgin status? The former, in particular, I can’t ever see coming to accept though I find both problematic.

I also appreciate the shift in tone by elrond, and in particular his last paragraph (on the 6:57 post) is a truthful and gracious way of saying what I would have wanted to and probably would not have been able to say as wisely.

Despite the article being a hoax, this is a reality that plays out in certain parts of what can corporately be called “the Evangelical Church”.

Scott Hahn, the professor, author and convert to Catholicism from Presbyterianism, has spoken about incorporating Catholic elements into his Presbyterian services when he was a pastor. The prime feature was the celebration of weekly communion.

And then there are the Christians associated with Christ Church and New St. Andrew’s College in Moscow, Idaho which practice a liturgical syle which includes paedo-communion. The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) of which this church is a charter member, has been accused by those in the broader evangelical world as being a springboard to Catholicism, as a number of members have converted from the CREC to Roman Catholicism.

Owing to the reformation, it has been the tradition of some churches that anything that resembles Catholic worship must be bad and that they must not give any notion of approval of Catholicism by integrating any Catholic elements into their worship. As some evangelicals set aside their prejudices and seek to discover the true roots and expressions of their Christianity (and others simply search for different expressions of worship), I believe you will see more Catholic and Orthodox elements being introduced into their worship. And I don’t believe this is necessarily a bad thing.

Re: What does the Orthodox Church teach about the sinlessness of Mary and her ever-virgin status? The former, in particular, I can’t ever see coming to accept though I find both problematic.

As far as I know, the Orthodox Church also considers Mary “all holy” (i.e. sinless) and “aieparthenos” (i.e. ever-virgin). Some Anglicans (like my church back home) shares both teachings as well.

I’ve considered shifting to another mainline denomination before (like the Methodists or Lutherans) to escape from some of the more over-the-top silliness in the Episcopal Church (Gene Robinson, etc.) but I’m not comfortable with the way too many Protestant churches downgrade Mary, and that’s one of the things that keeps me Anglican.

It should be remarked that the ‘textual’ evidence that Jesus had biological brothers, that some people like to cite, is essentially nonexistent, and all boils down to faulty understandings of linguistics. People in many cultures, including the Aramaic world as well as other parts of Asia (including the Tamil culture which my family grew up in), routinely use ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ to cover male and female cousins. This carries over into the way my family uses the English word ‘brother’, and no doubt it influenced the way the evangelists used the Greek word ‘brother’ as well.

Orthodoxy is a way of life. Nothing in an Orthodox church is there just for looks. None of the music is there just for entertainment. I was asked once by a co-worker what church I go to and when I told him he asked what kind of worship band we have. I thought later that I should have told him “the Heavenly band of angels and archangels”. The Orthodox Church is the place where Heaven and earth meet. Most of Protestantism is concerned with staying up with the culture and thier worship has crossed the line into entertainment. In this age many of us have forgotten what it means to offer up ourselves as a living sacrifice, acceptable and pleasing to God.

Before anyone beats me to it, I want to confess that my exposition was far too narrow. Incense is also used, for example, in processions and at the reading of the Holy Gospel, where it honors the sayings of Jesus. Even the Roman Catholic explanations which go into all the points I mentioned also stress that incense symbolizes prayer and suggests the atmosphere of heaven (where it is dispensed by angels standing beforee God in the book of Revelation). If (as is rare now) it is used so very generously as to form a cloud in the sanctuary, this cloud is a reminder of how the presence of God filled the temple in Jerusalem and left the people speechless with awe. You can read all the references to incense in scripture without inferring the specifically Eucharistic connotations that I mentioned.

Granting that you can read the Bible and pray as well as anyone else, it would therefore be silly to begrudge you the use of incense for those symbolic purposes. A glance at any treatise on the subject of incense will impress one as to the great worldwide variety of incense, of the receptacles for burning it, and of the occasions for its use, both religious and non-religious.

Surely the most dramatic to date must be the botafumeiro in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This thurible stands five feet high and swings from one end of the building’s transept to the other, in an arc of 65 meters during which it reaches a height of 25 meters (according to Wikipedia) . This being a famous and venerable pilgrimage destination, I suppose that one of its purposes is simply to cover the oder of sweating crowds having just completed their journey. One even hears that young altar boys have occasionally taken a ride on it, exhibiting an exemplary joyful death-defying theology. Now can’t you just see the enterprising pastor of some American megachurch first getting into the use of incense and then saying “Oh, we can top that!”

So if you really want to use incense in your services, there is no need to consult Catholic rubrics if the result would give the wrong impression of your beliefs. Be creative! We’d all feel better.